Crossing the Boundaries: Christian Piety and the Arts in Italian Medieval and Renaissance Confraternities.

In April of 1989 a conference on European confraternities was held at Victoria College of the University of Toronto. The volume under review, consisting of papers from the conference, is the third project spawned by this conference (the other two are a special issue of Renaissance and Reformation, 25:1 [1989], also containing papers from the conference, and a scholarly organization, the Society for Confraternity Studies, which publishes a newsletter, Confraternitas). The conference, and publication of its proceedings, reflect the rapid growth of interest in "popular" religion generally, and in confraternities in particular, in academic circles in the last twenty-five years. Confraternities as ecclesiastical institutions, their ties to literary production, and some of their links to other centers of social and political power, have been the objects of scholarly attention for much longer, of course. Their records have also for at least two centuries received a good deal of loving care from local historians, in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. But only relatively recently has the passion for collecting the minutiae of confraternity life been taken up by Anglophone academics as well.

The results, as represented by the essays collected in the volume under review, are on many levels fascinating and important. We now know far more than we once did about the texts and staging of many rituals sponsored by or for Italian confraternities (for Crossing the Boundaries, unlike its companion volume, limits itself to the Italian peninsula), thanks to the indefatigable labors of Cyrilla Barr, Kathleen Falvey, Jonathan E. Glixen, Nerida Newbigin, and Barbara Wisch. We are beginning to understand better the importance of confraternity art and music patronage, as Ellen Schiferl, Ludovica Sebregondi, and Edmond Strainchamps show us. And once in a while we catch a brief glimpse of what all this activity might have meant to the people who undertook it, as Nicholas Terpstra attempts to show in his discussion of burial rituals in Bolognese confraternities, or as Jean Weisz suggests in her analysis of changing meanings of caritas in a sixteenth-century Roman confraternity; more broadly, Ronald Weissman argues for a move toward more social historical, rather than history-of-spirituality, analyses of confraternities.

For all Weissman's claims that confraternity studies have remained (for him, excessively) attached to the history of spirituality or devotion, it seems to this reviewer that the problem lies less with the question of the specific historiographical tradition within which discussions of confraternities are undertaken, and more with questions of interpretation and approach broadly construed. That is, all of the essays in Crossing the Boundaries (with the exception of Weissman's, which deliberately takes up larger interpretive questions), attempt primarily to present new information about what confraternities did. They are the results of painstaking archival research, and as such they are very impressive. But where they attempt large questions of interpretation, they often do so very tentatively, almost as an aside or an obligation (an important exception is Newbigin's fine piece on "Cene and Cenacoli in the Ascension and Pentecost Companies of Fifteenth-Century Florence"). This fascination with what relatively ordinary people did in their religious lives, for so long assumed to have been exclusively defined by clerical elites, is tremendously important. As Nicholas Terpstra and Ronald Weissman recognize, however, we cannot leave confratelli isolated in their brotherhoods. More attention needs to be given both to the larger social networks of which confraternities were only a part, and, I would add, to analyzing the larger cultural meanings confraternity rituals both represented and helped to develop. Our study of late medieval and Renaissance spirituality and society still needs to be enhanced by further consideration of the contributions confraternities made to the larger structures, cultural and social, of which they were a part. As Terpstra reminds us, "if confraternity studies are to have more than antiquarian interest, it rests on our ability to integrate brothers into their networks and brotherhoods into their contexts, and so put confraternities on the agenda of medieval and early modem history." Crossing the Boundaries is an important foundation for this enterprise, but much more still needs to be built upon it.

Jennifer Fisk Rondeau UNIVERSITY OF OREGON